50 IBM Cloud Pak for Data v4.x Solution Architect Practice Questions: Question Bank 2025

A customer is planning an IBM Cloud Pak for Data deployment on OpenShift and wants to reduce risk by validating prerequisites before any operators or services are installed. Which approach is recommended?

A solution architect must ensure that Cloud Pak for Data users authenticate with the enterprise identity provider and that access can be managed using corporate groups. What is the best approach?

A governance team wants to ensure that sensitive columns (for example, national IDs) are consistently masked across all analytics and data science tools in Cloud Pak for Data. Which capability best addresses this requirement?

A customer wants workload isolation so that development teams can build and test assets without impacting production users on the same OpenShift cluster. Which design is most appropriate?

During a Cloud Pak for Data service installation, the operator reports that pods cannot be scheduled due to unbound PersistentVolumeClaims. The storage team confirms that a storage class exists, but PVCs remain Pending. What is the most likely root cause?

A company wants to enable data discovery and governance by ensuring technical metadata is captured for datasets registered in catalogs, including lineage from ingestion through consumption. Which approach best supports this goal?

A customer operates Cloud Pak for Data across multiple teams. They want to prevent a single team from consuming excessive CPU and memory, while still allowing bursting within approved limits. Which configuration best meets this requirement?

A security team requires that all external traffic to Cloud Pak for Data is encrypted, and that internal service-to-service communication also uses encryption in transit where supported. Which architectural approach is most appropriate?

A Cloud Pak for Data deployment experiences intermittent performance issues during peak usage. Monitoring shows CPU throttling on multiple pods, and many pods are stuck in Pending due to insufficient allocatable resources. The platform team cannot add new worker nodes immediately. What is the best short-term mitigation a solution architect should recommend?

A regulated customer requires evidence that only approved datasets can be used for model training, and that any dataset changes are auditable. Data scientists use multiple projects and tools within Cloud Pak for Data. Which design best meets this requirement?

A solution architect is preparing for a Cloud Pak for Data deployment on Red Hat OpenShift. The platform team asks which capability should be used to consistently enforce pod security and resource constraints for all Cloud Pak for Data workloads across namespaces. What is the recommended approach?

A governance lead wants to ensure business terms and policies are consistently applied and searchable across analytics projects, and that data assets can be curated with stewardship workflows. Which Cloud Pak for Data component best addresses this requirement?

A Cloud Pak for Data administrator needs to verify whether the platform services and a specific service instance are healthy after a change. What is the most appropriate first place to check within the platform?

A company must isolate development and production workloads for Cloud Pak for Data while still sharing the same OpenShift cluster. They also need separate role-based access control boundaries and independent service lifecycle management. What design best meets these requirements?

A data steward reports that analysts can see catalog asset metadata but cannot open the underlying data from a governed database connection. The connection tests successfully for the steward. What is the most likely cause?

A team is designing network access for Cloud Pak for Data in a regulated environment. Requirements include encrypted traffic in transit and controlled exposure of the web client to internal users only. Which approach best satisfies this?

During implementation, a Cloud Pak for Data service instance remains in a pending state. The OpenShift events show repeated failures to provision persistent volumes for the service pods. What is the most appropriate next action for the solution architect?

A company wants to reduce data duplication and control sensitive data exposure while enabling analysts to access data across multiple systems through the catalog. Which design pattern best aligns with this requirement?

A solution architect must design a highly available Cloud Pak for Data deployment. The business requires that a single worker node failure should not cause platform outage or loss of service availability beyond transient rescheduling. Which architectural choice is most critical to meet this requirement?

After enabling strict network segmentation, model deployment endpoints in Cloud Pak for Data become unreachable from applications, even though the UI works. The network team confirms that ingress to the UI hostname is allowed. What is the most likely missing consideration in the design?

A solution architect is planning a Cloud Pak for Data deployment on OpenShift. The customer requires that user authentication and group membership come from their corporate LDAP and that access to Cloud Pak for Data services be controlled by those groups. Which approach best meets this requirement?

A data governance team wants business users to search for data assets, view business terms, and request access in a controlled workflow. Which Cloud Pak for Data capability is most appropriate to implement first?

During a design review, a team asks where to store platform configuration and state for OpenShift and Cloud Pak for Data so it survives pod restarts and rescheduling. What is the correct architectural principle?

A customer reports that business users can see catalog assets but cannot preview data for a governed table, even after access is granted. The table is in Db2 and policy enforcement is required. Which configuration is most likely missing?

A solution architect must design network access for Cloud Pak for Data so that only specific corporate subnets can reach the web console while internal service-to-service traffic remains within the cluster. Which OpenShift-native approach best addresses this?

A team is deploying multiple Cloud Pak for Data services and wants to minimize future outages caused by resource contention. Which design choice is most aligned with best practices for reliability and performance?

A customer requires that Cloud Pak for Data and its services generate auditable records of user activity (for example, login events and administrative actions) and that these logs be retained centrally. What is the best architectural approach?

A global organization needs to isolate data by region while still offering a unified experience for discovery and governance. They want to enforce that EU users cannot access US-restricted datasets, even if they can see metadata. Which approach best satisfies both governance and separation requirements?

After integrating an external object storage for Cloud Pak for Data, workloads intermittently fail when writing results with errors indicating permission denied. The object storage bucket policy is correct, but failures correlate with node changes. What is the most likely root cause and fix?

A customer wants to run both latency-sensitive interactive workloads (notebooks, UI) and heavy batch processing on the same Cloud Pak for Data cluster. They report that during batch runs, the UI becomes unresponsive. Which solution design is most effective without deploying a second cluster?

A Cloud Pak for Data administrator wants to minimize cluster-wide impact when applying a new configuration for a single service instance. Which approach is the best practice?

A data governance lead wants business users to search for datasets, see lineage, and request access through a controlled workflow. Which Cloud Pak for Data capability best fulfills this requirement?

A solution architect must ensure Cloud Pak for Data users can authenticate with the company identity provider and be placed into appropriate groups for authorization. What is the recommended approach?

A platform team is troubleshooting why a Cloud Pak for Data service pod remains in Pending state. Which is the most likely root cause to check first?

A security team requires that sensitive columns (for example, national IDs) be protected consistently across cataloged datasets, and that masking rules be applied based on user roles. Which design best meets this requirement in Cloud Pak for Data?

A Cloud Pak for Data deployment must isolate workloads for multiple departments while still allowing shared platform services and centralized governance. Which approach is most appropriate?

An architect is designing a highly available Cloud Pak for Data environment. Which design choice best improves service resiliency during node failures?

A team reports that data lineage is incomplete: some ETL jobs appear in lineage graphs, but transformations performed in analytics notebooks do not. What is the best explanation and next step?

A regulated enterprise needs to allow data scientists to train models on sensitive datasets while ensuring raw data never leaves the platform boundary and access is auditable. Which architecture best satisfies this requirement?

After integrating Cloud Pak for Data with an enterprise object storage system, users intermittently fail to read/write data, and errors correlate with short-lived network disruptions. The storage team confirms eventual consistency and transient timeouts can occur. Which design change best improves reliability from the platform perspective?

A solution architect is gathering prerequisites before installing IBM Cloud Pak for Data on Red Hat OpenShift. Which item is MOST critical to validate early to avoid installation failures due to image pulls and operator deployment?

A team wants to standardize how application teams request and consume curated datasets within Cloud Pak for Data, including business definitions and steward approvals. Which capability BEST supports this goal?

A platform admin needs to ensure that only a specific group can create new Cloud Pak for Data service instances, while other users can still consume existing services in projects. What is the BEST approach?

A company must enforce that sensitive columns (e.g., National ID) are masked for most users but visible to a small compliance group across all analytics tools in Cloud Pak for Data. Which design BEST meets this requirement?

After deploying Cloud Pak for Data, a newly installed service does not appear in the Services catalog UI, but its operator shows as running in OpenShift. What is the MOST likely cause?

A solution requires that data scientists can query data in place from multiple databases without copying it into the platform, while still applying centralized governance policies. Which approach BEST fits?

An organization needs separate environments (dev, test, prod) for Cloud Pak for Data with strong isolation, but wants to reuse the same OpenShift cluster to reduce operational overhead. Which architecture is MOST appropriate?

Users report intermittent failures when running analytics workloads; the OpenShift cluster shows pods being evicted due to memory pressure on worker nodes. What is the BEST immediate remediation aligned with platform reliability?

A regulated enterprise requires end-to-end lineage from source systems through transformations to published data assets, including who changed transformations and when. Which combination BEST satisfies this requirement in Cloud Pak for Data?

A customer is designing for disaster recovery (DR). They want the ability to restore Cloud Pak for Data platform state and critical services after a regional outage, with minimal data loss. Which strategy is MOST appropriate?